Mary Kosut

Mad Artists and Tattooed Perverts: Deviant Discourse and the Social Construction of Cultural Categories

ABSTRACT American tattoo history confirms that definitions of deviancy are always in flux. Until the last two decades of the twentieth century, academics recognized tattooing as a semiotic representation of pathology and deviancy. Recently, tattooing was designated as a meaningful way to modify the body and a valuable cultural form. Much like the social construction of the aesthetic category of asylum art, some institutional experts are currently redrawing tattoo as aesthetically legitimate. The historical developments of asylum art and tattoo art are juxtaposed to elucidate how institutional discourses and structural changes effect the categorization of both individuals and the objects they produce. Emphasis is placed on how cultural boundaries shift over time, illustrating the relativity of deviance, changing conceptions of art, and the recently elevated status of tattoo within some milieus.

Professorial Capital: Blue-collar Reflections on Class, Culture and the Academy

Merging theory with autoethnographic reflections, the author critically explores the relationship between social class and the reproduction of inequality within the upper ranks of the academy, while reflexively and purposefully challenging traditional modes of academic discourse. Drawing from the authors experiences as a blue-collar sociology doctoral student, the concept of an academic class ceiling is elaborated. In an attempt to link everyday practices within a larger structural framework, the author advances a theory of professorial capital derived from Bourdieus concept of cultural capital. This article argues that unless the everyday dynamics of class exclusion are explicitly problematized, institutions will continue to implicitly reproduce the culture of the elite, and working-class voices will remain marginalized and silent.

Among the colony: Ethnographic fieldwork, urban bees and intra-species mindfulness

As a part of a larger ethnographic study of urban beekeepers in New York City, this article considers the challenges of conducting multispecies participant observation – being in the field with both human and non-human informants, beekeepers and bees. Keeping in mind the intra-active nature of human/insect entanglements, we explore how to interpret and translate the actions of another species while resisting anthropomorphic descriptions. Through a decentering of the authors, the bee is reflexively rendered as a non-human informant and an actor in its own right. The embodied experiences of conducting participation observation with humans and insects are used to speculate on the possibility of an ontology of bees and the idea of intra-species mindfulness. This work is in dialogue with the field of multispecies ethnography, actor-network theory and critical animal studies, positioning the bee though networks of ethnographic data and translation.

The Artification of Tattoo: Transformations within a Cultural Field

Theorized as a Bourdieusian field, this article examines changes inside the tattoo world resulting in the valuation of certain tattoo practices as art and some actors taking ‘fine art’ positions within it. The category of tattoo art is distinct from tattoo because it positions the practice away from its traditional historic moorings as a lowbrow craft and occupation requiring a rudimentary level of technical skill. In contrast, tattoo art is created and evaluated within academic discourses and traditional fine art ideologies that stress innovation, creativity, and exclusivity. In addition to mastery of the medium, that is, applying the tattoo to skin, tattoo artists create original works that qualify as artistic by art world conventions. This process of artification has changed the symbolic meanings and valuation of a practice, imbuing tattoo art with cultural legitimacy from the inside.

Bees, Border and Bombs: A Social Account of Theorizing and Weaponizing Bees

This chapter is an exploration into the ways in which bees have been constructed, exploited and deployed within the context of armed conflict and its aftermath. It begins with a brief overview of the militarization of bees in wartime. Next, it turns to the contemporary use of bees in critical theory as it is applied to war. It also explores how bees are unique in their relationship to human warfare humans can operationalize bees as a weapon, a weakness, a spy and/or a theory. As sociologists of culture, science and media, the chapter interprets the narratives of military scientists and entomologists, and how cuttingedge bee research has been reported in the media. It explores how bees are anthropomorphized as a reflection of global terrorism in a post-9/11 world. It concludes with thoughts about the exclusion of insects, particularly bees, in ethical considerations about animals and warfare. Keywords:bees; ethics; human wartime; military operations; military theory; sociological analysis; spy; weakness; weapons

Tattoos and Body Modification

This article examines tattooing as an ancient and contemporary form of body inscription and modification. It frames the popularity of tattooing in the Western World, in relation to other modern body modifications and within the landscape of consumer culture. Showing parallels between the motivations and meanings of contemporary tattoo practices, a historical overview of tattoos in premodern and non-Western cultures is presented. The divergent ways in which scholars have approached tattooing is examined, juxtaposing research in the behavioral sciences that links tattoos to deviant and antisocial behaviors with ethnographic and social–scientific studies that place tattoos within cultural, symbolic, esthetic, and prosocial frameworks.